


realize what I just realized

by JhanaMay



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek Needs To Use His Words, First Kiss, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 05:39:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9585794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JhanaMay/pseuds/JhanaMay
Summary: Spending Valentine's Day alone is nothing new to Stiles, but a surprise visit has the power to change everything. Wanting things he can't have is normal to Derek, but figuring out how to go about getting them is something totally different.Set in a nebulous post-Season 2.





	1. Stiles

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the [Fanfiction Writers Critique Group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1735180153380643/) on Facebook. We were each given three words to use in a short story. My words were thence, tusk, and mood.
> 
> Both chapters are the same scene written from two different POVs. I don't normally do that, but I'm playing around with the idea of writing my next long-fic in first person, so this was an attempt to see if I could pull off their voices. Feel free to drop me a comment and let me know if I succeeded (or not, lol).
> 
> As usual, thanks to Lucie and destimushi for wrangling my commas (and pronouns this time!)

I never lock my bedroom window. I probably should, given the number of ludicrous and truly heinous things that have tried to kill me in the last year, but it still doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort. There’s a very short list of people who think that my window is a legitimate means of entering the Stilinski household, and one of them is out on his super romantic date. Unlike Scott, I’m celebrating the V-day, as usual, by doing homework and steadfastly sticking to the Lydia Martin Ten Year Plan. It’s right on schedule.

So yeah, anyway, I don’t lock the window because nothing really terrifying has ever come through it. That may be short-sighted, but I’m nothing if not optimistic. When I hear the soft scrape of the casing being raised, I don’t even look up from my ecology notes. Mr. Stanton is a really weird guy, and the only way I’m ever going to use any of this stuff is if I go on Jeopardy, but it’s kind of interesting. Some of the things in the textbook rival the supernatural creatures I’ve met for downright weirdness.

I’m tapping out the rhythm line to _Seven Nation Army_ against the desk with my highlighter, bouncing my leg along to the lyrics running through my head. The Adderall I take every morning wears off around six, but the evening dose makes me jittery as hell at bedtime, so I usually try to suck it up unless I really need it. There are no tests tomorrow, so I skipped it, but that means I’m fully into my unmedicated ADHD glory, a sight not many people get to see.

I hear the soft thud of booted feet hit the floor and then the whoosh-snick of the window closing over the noise inside my own head. “Did you know that there are people who think that ground-up elephant tusk is an aphrodisiac?” I ask without bothering to turn around. The words are a little garbled around the pen cap I’ve been idly chewing on. This is why Dad carries his own pens and never uses the ones laying around the house. I pull it out of my mouth and roll it in my fingers.

“Uh, what?”

I turn around and catch Derek giving me that confused puppy dog look that shouldn’t be so damn cute, but it makes me crack up inside every time. There was a time in our relationship when Derek Hale scared the bejeezus out of me. To be fair, my heart rate still kicks up a little every time he slams me against a wall, but I’m starting to realize it’s for a very different reason. Becoming an Alpha and forming his little pack of awkward teenagers—and one creepy should-be-dead uncle—seems to have mellowed Derek out a little. No less grumpy, but slightly less prone to sudden, melodramatic violence. “Aphrodisiac,” I repeat slowly, just in case he bumped his head climbing up my trellis. “They grind it up and snort it because they think it will help them get it up.”

“I know what an aphrodisiac is, Stiles, and you don’t need one,” he retorts with that perpetually annoyed tone of his. At first, I thought he just used it around me, but no, he’s actually like that with everyone.

Wait, what? I narrow my eyes and stare him down. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He eyebrows draw together as if he just realized what he said; then he huffs out a soft growl. “You smell like sex all the time.”

My eyes flick over to my bed—where I rubbed one out less than a half hour ago—before I can stop myself. Maybe I should start locking the window during my private Stiles time, at least. “I’m a healthy teenage boy,” I say with a shrug, trying not to be weirded out by Derek Hale smelling my jizz. “And I’m pretty sure you didn’t sneak into my room—which was totally unnecessary, by the way, since my dad is at the station and you could have just used the front door—to talk about my masturbation habits.”

Derek’s eyebrows are doing that thing they do when he wishes I would stop talking. He probably thinks I don’t know what they’re trying to say because I never actually stop, but I’ve gotten really good at reading the subtleties of Derek’s various scowls. Now that I know he’s not going to rip my throat out on a whim, it’s actually kind of fun to fuck with the guy. “I didn’t think you’d be here,” he bites out. “It’s Valentine’s Day.”

I stop tapping the highlighter against my thigh when his words register, bringing the usual cacophony inside my head to a screeching halt. I’m actually not even sure where to begin to point out the many errors in his logic. “Where the hell did you think I’d be while you were very nonchalantly—and not at all stalkerly—climbing in my bedroom window?”

He shrugs—demonstrating awkwardly, yet again, that there is _nothing_ nonchalant about Derek Hale—and takes a step closer, his eyes picking up a glint of light from the lamp on my desk. “I thought you’d be out on a date.”

I actually laugh this time, because yeah, for an apex predator, this guy is pretty unobservant. “When in all the time we’ve known each other have you ever seen me go out on a date?”

He looks adorably confused again. “That’s what people do on Valentine’s Day.”

I sigh. “Sure, people who have a significant other,” I point out, throwing my hands out. I accidentally fling the pen cap at him, but it bounces harmlessly off his chest, so I resolutely ignore it. “Unlike your uncle Peter, most of us don’t just kidnap prospective companions off the street.”

His eyes track the pen cap for a moment, then he opens his mouth to correct me. After a second, he seems to realize that I’m being an asshole, and closes it with a snap. He’s getting better at reading me, too.

“Now that we’ve squared away the fact that apparently you and I are both dateless Valentine’s Day losers, you wanna tell me why you’re visiting my bedroom at nine-thirty on a school night? Were you just gonna hang out with the stuffed animals I have shoved under my bed?”

He flicks his eyes toward the bed, as if he might spot the toys that have been hiding under there since I was twelve, then realizes that I’m fucking with him again and scowls. This might actually be more fun than a date. “I need to use your laptop,” he says, pulling a small bundle out of the pocket of his leather jacket. He carefully unwraps what looks like a six-inch-long pine needle and holds it out for me to see. I reach for it impulsively—I obviously didn’t take my evening dose of slow-down meds—and he yanks it back before I can touch it. “Careful,” he growls, “I wiped the venom off the best I could, but I don’t know what it would do to you.”

“Venom,” I repeat, raising one eyebrow. “Can I assume that it did not come from a murderous pine tree?”

His lips quirk for a moment as if he’s actually going to smile before he shuts it down and frowns instead. So close. “More like a murderous porcupine, uh, creature,” he says with a grimace. Grimace, frown, scowl. Derek has a multitude of expressions for conveying his displeasure.

“Okay, fine. Give me a moment.” I close up my school books and stack them on the edge of the desk, carefully placing the highlighter next to them. I’ve gone through so many highlighters this year that I’m thinking of asking Dad for a gross of them for Christmas. I boot up my laptop and bring up the pages from the bestiary Lydia helped us translate from the archaic Latin or whatever the hell it was originally written in. Between the two of us, we managed to program a search function that I’m pretty proud of, so I start typing in random terms including _porcupine_ , _quills_ , and _prickly death sticks_. I watch Derek raise his eyebrows in the reflection of the laptop screen at the last one, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Her eyes glowed yellow,” he offers helpfully, “so I don’t know if she was some kind of werecreature we haven’t seen before or something different.” Part of me longs for the days before _werecreature_ became part of my everyday vocabulary.

I try to concentrate on what I’m doing, but Derek is standing so close that I feel the zipper of his jacket scrape against my spine when he leans in to watch me type. It’s crazy distracting. I ignore his hovering as best I can and add the new search term, but nothing comes back. Different combinations, different descriptors, and a few Google searches for venomous porcupines—making me really glad I got in the habit of clearing my browser history when I discovered online porn three years ago—and still nothing. I cock my head to the side and start to tilt back in the chair to ask if he’s sure the quill thing actually came out of her body when a soft inhale of air distracts me. “Did you just sniff me?” I accuse, spinning the chair so fast I almost crack him on the side of the face with my head.

Derek jumps back just in time to narrowly miss a concussion—not that I’d have hit him hard enough to give a werewolf a concussion, but it still would have smarted—and mutters a quick denial, but his eyebrows look guilty as hell. They’re better than a polygraph.

“You were sniffing me,” I repeat, not giving him a chance to wiggle out of it. I quickly run through the last twenty minutes and narrow my eyes. Two and two are sure as hell not adding up to four tonight. “Did you show up here to spend Valentine’s Day with me?” I ask suddenly, hoping the shock of the question throws him off enough that he answers honestly.

His eyes snap open wide, and he looks a little scared. “What? No, of course not,” he retorts, taking another step back. His voice might be saying no, but his eyebrows are telling a different story.

I push myself up from the chair and take a tentative step forward, marveling a little when he takes another step back. This is the first time in over a year that Derek is retreating from me instead of the other way around, and it’s a little heady. “If you wanted to spend Valentine’s Day together, Der, all you had to do was ask.”

“Why would you—”

I put one finger up, cutting him off. “First, you showed up here saying you didn’t think I’d be here, even though the chances of me being literally anywhere else are astronomically small.” His eyes slide away from mine as he starts to stammer a denial, but I interrupt again, “Second, you bring this quill-thing for me to look up. I don’t know where you got it or what it is, but I’d bet my police scanner and my entire collection of evidence bags that it’s not even from a supernatural creature, let alone one that you fought in the woods tonight. It would have made so much more sense to go to Deaton with this, but you came here instead. Thence—”

“Thence?” he repeats mulishly, taking his chance to cut me off. His jaw clenches and he shoves his hands in his jacket pockets, probably so I can’t see that they’re shaking. The thought makes me bold enough that I take another step forward, almost cackling in amusement when the bed stops his retreat. I take another two steps until I’m—crazily and maybe a little self-destructively—right up in his person space. His eyes dilate a little, and if I was a werewolf, I swear I’d be able to smell his arousal.

“Thence,” I echo, dropping my voice to a whisper even though my heart is threatening to beat out of my chest. There’s no way he can’t hear it pounding. “You know, as in ‘consequently.’ Thence, I can only conclude that you invented the whole thing so you could come over here and spend Valentine’s Day with me instead of just asking me out like a normal person.” I’m pretty damn proud of the fact that my voice doesn’t waver at that bold assertion because if there was ever a reason for Derek to return to his life-threatening ways, this is it.

For one horrible moment, he doesn’t react. I try to convince myself that he isn’t actually going to risk tearing my throat out when suddenly his eyes flash red, and he leans in to do the last—no, not really the last, but pretty damn close to the last—thing I expect. He buries his face in my neck, his stubble scraping the bottom of my jaw, and draws in a long, deep breath through his nose. His whole body shudders, but when he leans back his eyes are clear slate green again. He stares me down, his eyebrows suddenly defiant, and says on an exhale, “And if I asked, what would you say?”

The mood in the room is abruptly a hundred and fifty percent more charged than it’s ever been between us before—even counting the day he tried to convince me to cut off his arm—and all my words suddenly dry up in my throat. Given that I haven’t pushed him away, and that my last orgasm ended with his name on my lips, there really isn’t any doubt about what I would say. Instead of answering, I counter with a bold move of my own—one that I’m not sure whether he expects or not. I snag his belt loops with my fingers and tug him forward so that I can slide my lips, gentle and teasing, over his. He sways toward me with a groan, his mouth parting under mine so that he can lick along the seam of my lips. We both pull away with a soft sigh at the same time. His pupils are blown wide, with just a tinge of red glinting around the edges, and it’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. “I don’t know,” I breathe without any nonchalance at all, “why don’t you ask me and find out?”


	2. Derek

The tiny sliver of moon provides almost no light, but I’d be able to find my way to Stiles’ house in the dark even without my enhanced senses. Parking the Camaro down the street was just a precaution in case the Sheriff was home, but the walk gives me plenty of time to second-guess how ridiculously juvenile this is.

I palm the small bundle in my pocket and slow to a stop, thinking again about going back to the car and driving home. Beacon Hills is going through an uncharacteristic lull in supernatural activity, so I haven’t had a reason to see Stiles in almost a month. That’s not why I’m so jumpy, though. It’s just that after everything that has happened, I’m not used to the inactivity. It’s making my skin crawl.

The house is only a couple yards ahead, and the only light visible is in Stiles’ bedroom. Although the Sheriff’s car is gone—as it is all too often—I don’t even consider going to the front door. This isn’t a social call. I force myself forward until I’m standing in the shadows surrounding the house. There’s one heartbeat inside, meaning Erica was right when she said that Scott wouldn’t be there. She laughed when I asked if she thought Stiles would be home tonight, and then pointed out that it would be nice for her and Boyd to have the loft to themselves for Valentine’s Day as if those two things were related.

I scale the house quickly, both relieved and infuriated to find the window unlocked. Between werewolves, kanima, hunters, and everything else that has tried to take a bite out of him in the last year, Stiles is still too stupid to lock his fucking window. How am I supposed to keep him safe if he doesn’t have the slightest bit of common sense? Teenagers might be easier to turn, but they sure as hell aren’t easier to keep in line, especially when I’ve found myself adopting all of their incredibly breakable human friends into my pack. It gives me a new appreciation for what Laura went through with me after the fire.

Stiles is sitting at the desk on the other side of the room, and he doesn’t even flinch when I drop to the floor and close the window behind me. School work is spread out in front of him, and he’s tapping on the edge of the desk with his highlighter, his leg bouncing to a jittery counter-rhythm. I inhale his scent, carefully ignoring the lingering musk of sex and arousal that always surrounds him. The usual acid tinge of the medication that barely grounds him is missing, no longer masking the scent that is one hundred percent Stiles. I take another deep breath—memorizing the smell—just as he speaks.

“Did you know that there are people who think that ground-up elephant tusk is an aphrodisiac?” he asks without turning around. The words are a little garbled around the pen cap in his mouth. He pulls it out and rolls it in his fingers, and my eyes track the movement.

“Uh, what?” I’m distracted by the smell of the saliva he’s spreading over the surface of the cap, but since I so rarely know what Stiles is talking about anyway, it isn’t really an excuse.

He turns around and cocks his head to the side, almost as if he’s surprised to see me even though he clearly knew I was there. “Aphrodisiac,” he repeats slowly, and I let my gaze drop down to follow the way his lips shape the word. For fuck's sake, this kid is going to be the death of me. “They grind it up and snort it because they think it will help them get it up.”

The way he says _get it up_ almost does me in. “I know what an aphrodisiac is, Stiles, and you don’t need one,” I retort sharply. The last thing this kid needs is to be more turned on. The whole room reeks like fresh jizz as it is. The smell clings to his skin constantly. It’s fucking distracting. 

His eyes narrow and he stares at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I frown as I realize what I just implied. It’s not like it’s a secret anyway; surely Scott has mentioned it. Although Scott is completely enthralled by the Argent girl—a thought that still makes me nauseous even though I know she’s nothing like Kate—the idea of him anywhere adjacent to Stiles still makes me huff out a soft growl. Scott may be his best friend, but the kid is still a doofus. “You smell like sex all the time,” I bite out, though pointing it out may actually kill me.

His eyes flick over to his bed, and I force myself to look away before I drag him over there myself. I can imagine Stiles writhing on those sheets, hand firm on his dick as he strokes himself. It’s not doing anything for my composure. “I’m a healthy teenage boy,” he says with a shrug, and I clench my jaw shut to hold back a whine, but he’s still talking anyway. “And I’m pretty sure you didn’t sneak into my room—which was totally unnecessary, by the way, since my dad is at the station and you could have just used the front door—to talk about my masturbation habits.”

I scowl at him, wishing he would stop before I do something I’ll regret. Why did I think coming over here was a good idea? I miss the days when a simple stare was enough to paralyze him with fear, but familiarity has reduced the effectiveness. “I didn’t think you’d be here,” I point out, even though I pretty much assumed that he would be. Erica assured me that Stiles didn’t have a date. “It’s Valentine’s Day.”

He stops tapping the highlighter against his thigh and stares at me again. I always get the feeling that he’s running through a hundred different responses in his head every time he does that. I wonder how he chooses between them. “Where the hell did you think I’d be while you were very nonchalantly—and not at all stalkerly—climbing in my bedroom window?”

I shrug as nonchalantly as I can and take a step closer. His pulse picks up slightly, and I tamp down my own little surge of excitement at his response. “I thought you’d be out on a date.”

His bark of laughter is a little bitter, and I almost cringe. “When in all the time we’ve known each other have you ever seen me go out on a date?”

That doesn’t make any sense. I know he’s been holding out hope for the Martin girl, but she’s so sickeningly in love with Jackson that even a human could smell it on her. Even though Lydia has no taste, though, surely other people are interested in Stiles. It makes no sense to me. “That’s what people do on Valentine’s Day.”

He sighs and leans forward in the chair. “Sure, people who have a significant other,” he says vehemently, throwing his hands out. The pen cap he’s been fiddling with flies out and bounces off my chest, leaving a smear of his saliva on my shirt. “Unlike your uncle Peter, most of us don’t just kidnap prospective companions off the street.”

It’s a fair point about Peter, but I can’t look away from the pen cap where it lays on the floor. I wonder if it would be weird for me to pick it up and put it in my pocket. I finally tear my gaze away and look back up at him. I open my mouth to ask why he wouldn’t have just asked someone out, but I realize quickly that I don’t want to know the answer, so I snap my jaw shut so hard it hurts.

“Now that we’ve squared away the fact that apparently you and I are both dateless Valentine’s Day losers, you wanna tell me why you’re visiting my bedroom at nine-thirty on a school night? Were you just gonna hang out with the stuffed animals I have shoved under my bed?”

I flick my eyes toward the bed, torn between wondering if there really are toys under his bed and whether he keeps lube in his nightstand drawer. I’m always off-balance with him, and it drives me crazy. Why can’t he ever just say what he means? “I need to use your laptop,” I say instead of the dozens of really inappropriate things running through my head. I might as well try to wrestle this evening back on track.

I pull the small bundle out of my pocket and carefully unwrap the six-inch-long quill I took from the Hale vault earlier this afternoon. Like the idiot he is, Stiles reaches out to touch it, but I yank it back before he can. “Careful,” I growl, letting my frustration color my voice. He has no sense of self-preservation. “I wiped the venom off the best I could, but I don’t know what it would do to you.”

“Venom,” he repeats, raising one eyebrow. “Can I assume that it did not come from a murderous pine tree?”

I never saw the creature that it came from, but I overheard my mother talking to Laura about it. From her description, it definitely wasn’t a pine tree, though I’m sure Laura would find that a lot more amusing. My lips quirk up into a smile for a moment before I remember that Laura’s dead. She can’t find anything amusing anymore. “More like a murderous porcupine, uh, creature,” I say with a grimace. Just one of the dozens of mysterious artifacts locked away in the vault. Trying to narrow down their origin seems as good a use of this unexpected hiatus as any.

He stares at me for a long moment, his dark brown eyes holding something I can’t read, before blinking and looking away. “Okay, fine. Give me a moment.” He gathers the books and papers spread across the desk and stacks them on the edge, then flips his laptop open. The computer is set to a desktop picture of a much younger Stiles with a woman that I assume is his mom. I look away while he pulls up the pages for the bestiary. Sometimes I forget that I’m not the only one who has lost someone.

The first few search terms he enters yields no results. When he enters _prickly death sticks_ , I see his eyes flick to mine in the reflection of the laptop screen, as if he’s waiting for me to say something. I raise my eyebrows in challenge, but he just smirks and looks away.

“Her eyes glowed yellow,” I offer helpfully, trying to remember everything I’d heard, “so I don’t know if she was some kind of werecreature we haven’t seen before or something different.” For whatever reason, I don’t tell him that the _we_ I’m talking about is my long-dead family, not our ragtag pack. I lean in as he types a few more words so that I can watch his clever hands fly across the keyboard. He’s just a kid, I remind myself. Bold and loyal and smart-as-hell, but still just a kid. Off limits. I never realized that twenty-three could feel so fucking old before.

He chews absently at his bottom lip as he pulls up Google and searches for a few things, including venomous porcupines, without flinching. I try to imagine what it must have been like for him to be thrust headfirst into this world I’ve known my entire life, and I’m really not sure I would have taken it so well. Add brave and steadfast to the list of things I’m not supposed to admire about this stupid loudmouthed kid who has saved my life more than once.

All at once, he throws his hands up and leans back in the chair. Caught off guard, I don’t pull away quickly enough, and suddenly my face is buried in the silky hair just above his ear. There’s heat, soft strands tickling my nose and flooding my lungs with the spicy sweet scent of him. It’s a smell that haunts me, that I spend every moment I’m around him trying to ignore. Without thinking, I take a deep breath, trying to fill every part of myself with his scent.

I realize almost immediately that I’ve fucked up when every muscle in his body goes tense, just before he spins the chair around so fast that he almost catches me on the cheek with his head. “Did you just sniff me?” he accuses as I’m jerking away from him. I mutter a quick denial, trying not to meet his eyes.

“You were sniffing me,” he repeats, his tone adamant. I’m still trying to think up some reasonable explanation that doesn’t sound like I’m the deranged stalker he keeps accusing me of being when he suddenly asks, “Did you show up here to spend Valentine’s Day with me?”

My eyes snap open wide. Shit. “What? No, of course not,” I growl, taking another step back. The fact that it’s Valentine’s Day is only incidental.

 He pushes himself up from the chair and takes a tentative step forward. Even though I could snap him like a twig, I step back again. It’s only three more feet to the window. “If you wanted to spend Valentine’s Day together, Der, all you had to do was ask,” he says, his voice husky. The nickname makes my stomach squirm.

“Why would you—”

He puts one finger up, cutting me off. “First, you showed up here saying you didn’t think I’d be here, even though the chances of me being literally anywhere else are astronomically small.” My eyes slide away from his, and I start to stammer a denial, but he interrupts again, “Second, you bring this quill-thing for me to look up. I don’t know where you got it or what it is, but I’d bet my police scanner and my entire collection of evidence bags that it’s not even from a supernatural creature, let alone one that you fought in the woods tonight. It would have made so much more sense to go to Deaton with this, but you came here instead. Thence—”

“Thence?” I repeat mulishly, taking the chance to cut him off. I clench my jaw so hard I might crack a tooth and shove my hands in his jacket pockets. They’re not shaking yet, but if I don’t think of a way to put him off, they might. It’s ridiculous that this scrawny kid has this effect on me. He takes another step forward, and I retreat again, until the back of my legs hit his bed, effectively cutting off my escape route. Instead of stopping, though, he takes another two steps until he’s practically pressed against me. Between his heat at my front and the smell of sex emanating from the bed behind me, I’m not surprised when my body reacts predictably.

“Thence,” he echoes, dropping his voice to a whisper. His words are strong and even despite how fast his heart is racing. “You know, as in ‘consequently.’ Thence, I can only conclude that you invented the whole thing so you could come over here and spend Valentine’s Day with me instead of just asking me out like a normal person.”

For one long moment, I’m frozen. At first, I’m convinced that he’s making fun of me. Asking him out, dating, relationships. Those are things other people do. They’re not things I’m allowed to have. But he’s right there, so close I can feel his breath on my face, and his heartbeat, though galloping with nerves, is steady. There’s no lie in him at all. I start to shift almost against my will, and I let myself fall forward so that my face is buried in the juncture of his neck and shoulder, the rasp of my stubble against his skin almost deafening. His scent is strong there, just below the pulse beating against my cheek. I draw in a long, deep breath through my nose, bathing myself in him and my whole body shudders. I rest there—aching to put my mouth on him—until I have myself under control. When I lean back, I stare him down. My mouth dry and my own pulse pounding in my ears, I breathe out, “And if I asked, what would you say?”

His eyes flicker back and forth as if he’s searching for something in mine. I’m almost certain he’s going to laugh, make some joke, and push me away. Instead, he does the last thing I expect. He snags my belt loops with his fingers and tugs me forward so that he can slide his lips, gentle and teasing, over mine. I sway toward him with a groan, chasing the taste of him, my mouth parting under his so that I can lick along the seam of his lips. We both pull away with a soft sigh at the same time. His pupils are blown wide, the rich chocolate just a ring of color, and it’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. “I don’t know,” he breathes without any nonchalance at all, “why don’t you ask me and find out?”


End file.
